Welcome back! Extra special open thread!

Surprised to not see a “Maintainence Mode” page when visiting hoydenabouttown.com? Us too! But after a bunch of technical wrangling, we’ve busted out of our shared server environment and stopped overloading their system and are stretching out luxuriously on our virtual private server.

Enjoy this rocket cake, and as usual for an open thread, even on a non-Otterday, please feel free to use this thread to natter about anything your heart desires. Is there anything great happening in your life? Anything you want to get off your chest? Reading a good book (or a bad one)? Anything in the news that you’d like to discuss? What have you created lately? Commiserations, felicitations, temptations, contemplations, speculations?

My connection keeps switching back and forth between the old site and the new site, which is pretty damned annoying, let me tell you. I can’t put up a new post without it switching, or post a comment from the front-end, but I can reply to other people’s comments in the back-end. Sometimes. Grrr.

White people on Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr are being extremely selective in the MLK quotes they are using to police black people with.
Just the “safe” quotes that make white people feel good and don’t threaten them.
Remember how white people used MLK when he was alive to stop the threat of Malcolm X and black radicals?
You saw it again in the eighties when Jesse Jackson was touted as a possible presidential candidate. White people branded Jackson a “race hustler” who was “stirring up the blacks” and destroyed him.
I’m filled with so much anger at injustice right now.

I went to NZ at the beginning of this year and spent a bit of time (not nearly long enough …) at Te Papa – it really is pretty wonderful.
I also enjoyed the tour of the Parliament, not least the bit where they take you to the basement and show you the shock absorbers 🙂

How is it that I forget, every single day, that my baby needs two long naps?? Naps that occur at times of the day when I would usually, say, go to Te Papa. (She’s not really a portable napper. If there are people and other interesting things, she doesn’t nap, resulting in, for example, yesterday’s plane flight experience.)
Still hoping to get there. We’ll see.

Liveblogging my attempt to leave my hotel room: yeah no, after three hours in teleconfs, one with the baby screaming piteously, I don’t think I should try and cram sightseeing into a solo international business trip with a baby.
WHAT WAS I THINKING?
also
DAMMIT.

Hurray HaT is back!
Have so much to whinge about.
Feeling like Peter about Scott Morrison’s evil move in the Senate. Not buying Ricky Muir etc saying “oh we had to, or he wouldn’t release the children from detention.”
Have no words to describe Morrison, the pollies who voted for TPVs and the people who approve of this.
Going for a walk now. Had an absolute shit of a day ( families! work colleagues! tired cranky shitty children! ) and hopefully it will be wine o’clock when I get back.
But so glad maintenance mode is done!

Andie acknowledges that many mothers in their rush to protect their daughters from stereotypes have demonised femininity and femaleness.
You see this in the modern trend of baby girls being given masculine surnames and boys names as their given names. There’s some nasty sexist logic behind this trend, despite it being cloaked by those mothers in feminism.

You mean this single sentence where she summarises what another woman wrote?

In her article, Macdonald even offered her mea culpa recommendation that you not demonise femininity in the rush to free your daughter from gender stereotypes.

And then went on to point out how Latham bulldozed through that to portray McDonald as an ideological extremist running an irresponsible sociological experiment with her own children? That one sentence was what you chose to highlight? That’s switching the Strawman train to the Derail City tracks, Peter. We’re not going to play that game with you.